Monthly Archives: April 2014

Ah, the humble nutrition label. Since it was introduced in the 1990’s (in the U.S., anyway), it’s been pretty much ubiquitous. We see them everywhere, whether we understand them or not.

They’re particularly puzzling on foods with multiple ingredients. Looking at a nutrition label and an ingredients list side-by-side, you might guess which ingredients contribute the most to each nutrient, but you may be wrong.

Why am I talking about nutrition on a web development blog?

We implemented nutrition labels for Cook Smarts meal planning app, and put a twist on the classic. In addition to showing a nutrition label for every recipe, we show which ingredients contribute the most to each nutrient.

For instance, below are the nutrition facts for Orange-Sesame Beef Stirfry. By expanding the total fat, I can see that the #1 and #2 contributors are the flank steak and the cooking oil.

If I were counting carbs, I could expand total carbs and perhaps cut back on the rice.

Since we integrated the USDA’s robust nutrition database into Cook Smarts’ recipe editor on the back-end, we had this per-ingredient data. Instead of just exposing the recipe’s total nutrition facts, we tried to think of ways to go a little deeper. This is our first attempt at doing so!

The USDA database is huge, so we brought it onto a separate server that we interface with using our own API. It’s working well, and keeping the extra load off of Cook Smarts’ primary app server. More on our first attempt at service-oriented architecture soon!